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The Convict Lover
Book by Merilyn Simonds
- GenresNonfictionCanada
372 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
14 people are currently reading
196 people want to read
About the author
Merilyn Simonds
23 books60 followersMerilyn Simonds is the author of 18 books, including the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and the Canadian classic nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover, a finalist for the Governor General's Award. In 2017, Project Bookmark Canada unveiled a plaque to honour the place of The Convict Lover in Canada’s literary landscape.
Simonds’ short fiction is anthologized internationally and her books are published in the UK, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States. In 2012 she published The Paradise Project, a collection of flash fiction hand-printed on an antique press with endpapers made from plants in her garden. The experience of producing the collection in both a digital and book-arts edition is the subject of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books. Her most recent publication is Refuge, a novel set in Mexico City, New York, and eastern Ontario.
Simonds writes a blog—Books Unpacked—on her website merilynsimonds.com. She shares her life with writer Wayne Grady. They divide their time between Mexico and Canada.
Simonds’ short fiction is anthologized internationally and her books are published in the UK, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States. In 2012 she published The Paradise Project, a collection of flash fiction hand-printed on an antique press with endpapers made from plants in her garden. The experience of producing the collection in both a digital and book-arts edition is the subject of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels, and the Lasting Impression of Books. Her most recent publication is Refuge, a novel set in Mexico City, New York, and eastern Ontario.
Simonds writes a blog—Books Unpacked—on her website merilynsimonds.com. She shares her life with writer Wayne Grady. They divide their time between Mexico and Canada.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
November 21, 2018
This was such an interesting book! The author found bits of paper and letters and scraps in a tin in her attic and pieced together this story about a young girl exchanging letters with a convict in the Kingston pen in the 1920s. She transcribed the letters completely and also weaved in the position of the Superintendent with his vision and plans for sweeping prison reform.
Although quite dry and slow throughout, it did put a smile on my face to see Windsor, Ontario mentioned. This was where the convict moved to when he was released from prison. She mentions Caron and Crawford Avenues and although she says in the Author's Notes these streets no longer exist, she must mean the houses, or those particular street addresses no longer exist, because I can tell you Crawford and Caron Avenues are still here. I drive by them everyday on my way into work. :-)
This ends as a sad story for Phyllis, the girl writing to the convict. She waited and pinned hopes and dreams on being with him after his release. He turned out to be not the person she thought he was through his letters. Through Simonds extensive research she shows he was a shifty character and one who was imprisoned more times than just his two-year stint in Kingston.
Read for my #NonfictionNovember
Although quite dry and slow throughout, it did put a smile on my face to see Windsor, Ontario mentioned. This was where the convict moved to when he was released from prison. She mentions Caron and Crawford Avenues and although she says in the Author's Notes these streets no longer exist, she must mean the houses, or those particular street addresses no longer exist, because I can tell you Crawford and Caron Avenues are still here. I drive by them everyday on my way into work. :-)
This ends as a sad story for Phyllis, the girl writing to the convict. She waited and pinned hopes and dreams on being with him after his release. He turned out to be not the person she thought he was through his letters. Through Simonds extensive research she shows he was a shifty character and one who was imprisoned more times than just his two-year stint in Kingston.
Read for my #NonfictionNovember
September 8, 2013
I found the premise fascinating. An account of the relationship between a convict and a young woman pieced together by letters found in a Kingston attic. At times slow moving but good insight into prison life.
June 5, 2014
This was hard to get through but I appreciated the documented aspects, pictures etc.
August 1, 2021
Several years ago, Merilyn Simonds, a Canadian writer and former editor, moved into an old house in Kingston Ontario. In the attic she found a trove of papers, some scattered on the floor, some stashed in large old Lantic sugar bags tied up with old rags. Letters stamped with the two-cent portrait of George V were thrown in with magazine clippings, old photos, bills, pamphlets, diaries and some old clothes. When Simonds began reading the letters, she became intrigued, realizing what she held in her hands was the story of an unorthodox relationship between a young girl and a convict and a remarkable record of what life was like at the Kingston Penitentiary in the 1900s.
Believing there was an interesting book somewhere in the mix, she spent the next year trying to sort the letters, putting them in order and creating a timeline, a task which proved difficult as only three were dated. Using these documents, she wrote “The Convict Lover”, recreating the story of the relationship that developed between Joseph Cleroux, a con artist and a thief jailed in the Kingston Penitentiary and Phyllis Halliday, a simple seventeen-year-old village girl living in Portsmouth just outside the prison. The events take place from late 1919 to the spring of 1921, a time when Kingston was where Canada’s most notorious men were imprisoned. Published in 1996, this was Simonds first literary work, a volume which earned a place as a finalist for that year’s Governor General Awards.
Simonds recognizes her work is difficult to place in any specific genre and calls her effort a piece of narrative non-fiction, since all the events and characters in the story existed, while the thoughts, feelings and conversations are from her speculative pen.
Joseph Cleroux, known as prisoner G852, was serving a sentence of two years and a day, imposed when he escaped a Northern Ontario work camp where he had been sent after stealing a car. As part of a prison chain gang, he made a daily trek to the limestone quarry passing the Halliday family home on the way. Noticing a girl in the garden playing with her dog, he tried to get her attention, dropping a note on the side of the road.
Phyllis Halliday picked it up, knowing that communicating with a prisoner was strictly against the law. Her father had also warned his family to be careful of the prisoners passing by, and not to be unkind, but not to be friendly either. After careful consideration, Phyllis decided it was her Christian duty to help the prisoner. She would write him back but as an extra measure of safety would not use her real name and instead call herself “Peggy”. She communicated with him for over a year, a correspondence which quickly became the focus of her life.
Joseph called himself “Josie” and she called him “Daddy Long Legs”. It was not long before he began asking her for favors and she was carrying out daily errands for him. First it was tobacco, which was not just for personal enjoyment; it was the currency of the prison. With it you could bribe an officer, procure liquor, food or drugs or pay another convict for “services”. His requests moved on to candy, gum, newspapers and posting letters, their exchanges made using a secret hiding place in the quarry. The guards always searched the men when they returned from working outside and although security was tight, corruption was rampant; they would ignore the suspicious bulge in a prisoner’s clothing for a price. In return, Josie loaned Phyllis books from the prison library, although there was little choice of subject matter. Most were dated novels or old school textbooks with pages torn out and covered with prisoners’ comments in the margins.
There were several times when the two were almost caught and during those times Phyllis reconsidered her actions, her thoughts moving back and forth between thinking she was guilty of a sin and her belief she was carrying out an act of Christian charity.
Phyllis treasured every note Daddy Long Legs sent her, keeping them hidden in an Ovaltine tin under her bed. She quickly created a fantasy about their relationship, led on by his charming comments that he knew would secure her as his accomplice. The correspondence continued throughout his incarceration and when he was released, he disappeared.
The doomed affair was carried out against the backdrop of life at the Kinston Penitentiary in the early 1900s, a time when prisoners were treated cruelly and few supported prison reform. One of the major instigators for change was the Superintendent of Prisons, William St Pierre Hughes, who fought a long hard battle against the politicians and the Minister of Justice trying to change a system he believed was outdated, inhuman and doomed to failure. The rules and regulations had not been revised for over thirty years and Hughes had ambitious plans for his penitentiaries, but he was a man ahead of his time. He was mocked as a “convict lover” by those who felt that prisoners should be treated with strict discipline, beaten when they broke the rules and forced to do hard manual labour. They believed the only way convicts would turn away from bad behavior was if they were forced from it and cruelty was the mainstay of their approach. In the midst of this system were the officers and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in line, a relationship prone to corruption. Prisoners paid bribes so guards would look the other way when tobacco was passed, a deal was done and acts of sex or vengeance were carried out. Prisoners who thwarted the rules or upset the system were sent to the “The Hole”, an isolation unit where they were kept in a completely empty room with their hands shackled to the bars and left there for days on end, fed bread and a mug of water twice a day. There was also the room where they were stripped half naked and whipped or beaten, away from the eyes and ears of those who might see or hear what was going on.
Simonds creates rich portraits of the characters for her readers. Joseph Cleroux was a thief and a con artist, a handsome man who had manipulated people and his circumstances for years, supporting himself through crime. He was charming and smart, determined that his incarceration would not break him and he would survive to be free. He had already escaped the Great War and the Flu epidemic; he would find a way to endure. Unwilling to risk escape, he obeyed the rules when he had to and broke them when he could, insulating himself against prison life with bits of stolen clothing, pilfered food and smuggled tobacco.
One way he stepped away from the confines of his life was through his letters with Peggy, who smuggled him the goods he needed to be part of the prison’s underground economy and made life a little easier. He never criticized her, nurtured his connection with kind words and talked about his love of poetry. His letters were filled with spelling mistakes and he always signed them with these parting words: “trust me”. Yet he was far from truthful. He reinvented himself, lying about his family, his true identity and his criminal past, knowing she would never discover the truth. It was not so much Peggy that he wanted, it was the connection to the free world he needed. Peggy came to be his lifeline, a shelter from the silence imposed in the prison. He could talk to her about anything he wanted and with whatever words filled his head; it was a relief. He promised her many things but never delivered, even though she had risked so much to help him.
Phyllis was a plain and simple school girl in a large family. She had always been sickly and suffered from the cold with lung congestion and headaches. Never comfortable in social situations with her peers, Peggy quietly avoided them. Nor was she a good student. Her life, filled with the endless repetitive routines of home life, church and school did not point to any bright future and Portsmouth held little promise. She knew all the families, their siblings and their back stories and spent her days wishing for a different life. She easily fell under the spell of the convict, a man she never met or touched, her only connection their letters. As time passed, only his words mattered to her. His letters shaped her days as she waited for them, read them or stored up news to share with him. And there was that anticipation of opening the envelope and seeing what he had to say. When he said he enjoyed dancing, she practiced her steps in the kitchen with an imaginary partner. She wrote to him faithfully every day as her ruminations about what she constituted a sin and whether what she was doing was putting herself and her family at risk gradually faded. She convinced herself she was performing a Christian deed and earning a place for herself in heaven. Her naiveté deepened and led her to believe in a life that would come to be when Daddy Long Legs was released and they would share a life together. She imagined him striding up the path to her house with a ring in his pocket and a smile on his face.
Simonds’s created her narrative using seventy-nine letters from the Josie and four from Peggy, interspersing the letters with the story of how these two people, both hungry for a human connection, carried out their clandestine relationship. For both characters this communication with the other helped make life bearable.
This is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction, an important story because it provides an uncensored version of what life was like for prisoners in the Kingston Penitentiary during that time, a part of the narrative which at times is difficult to read. She also gives readers a sense of Portsmouth, the small town around the prison that housed the prison staff, their families and the services that supported them.
Simonds finishes the volume with an epilogue describing her unsuccessful attempts to find out more about the identity of Joseph Cleroux and what became of him. He used several pseudonyms, so she widened her search to a variety of names and places he was believed to have lived. She poured over census and property records, births deaths and marriages but came up empty, her only finding a mug shot of him in Ottawa’s National Archives. The addresses he had given Peggy led to run down rooming houses and one even led to a wooden shack.
Phyllis Halliday died a spinster in 1986 and lived in the house Simonds eventually came to own in Kingston. It was sold several times, each time that trove of documents was left in the attic, either no one had thought to go up there or saw what was there and chose to ignore it.
This proved to be a fascinating read. Kudos is deserved for the jacket cover which incorporates a postcard of Kingston Penitentiary and excerpts from Cleroux’s letters, a design which aptly reflects the contents of the book.
Believing there was an interesting book somewhere in the mix, she spent the next year trying to sort the letters, putting them in order and creating a timeline, a task which proved difficult as only three were dated. Using these documents, she wrote “The Convict Lover”, recreating the story of the relationship that developed between Joseph Cleroux, a con artist and a thief jailed in the Kingston Penitentiary and Phyllis Halliday, a simple seventeen-year-old village girl living in Portsmouth just outside the prison. The events take place from late 1919 to the spring of 1921, a time when Kingston was where Canada’s most notorious men were imprisoned. Published in 1996, this was Simonds first literary work, a volume which earned a place as a finalist for that year’s Governor General Awards.
Simonds recognizes her work is difficult to place in any specific genre and calls her effort a piece of narrative non-fiction, since all the events and characters in the story existed, while the thoughts, feelings and conversations are from her speculative pen.
Joseph Cleroux, known as prisoner G852, was serving a sentence of two years and a day, imposed when he escaped a Northern Ontario work camp where he had been sent after stealing a car. As part of a prison chain gang, he made a daily trek to the limestone quarry passing the Halliday family home on the way. Noticing a girl in the garden playing with her dog, he tried to get her attention, dropping a note on the side of the road.
Phyllis Halliday picked it up, knowing that communicating with a prisoner was strictly against the law. Her father had also warned his family to be careful of the prisoners passing by, and not to be unkind, but not to be friendly either. After careful consideration, Phyllis decided it was her Christian duty to help the prisoner. She would write him back but as an extra measure of safety would not use her real name and instead call herself “Peggy”. She communicated with him for over a year, a correspondence which quickly became the focus of her life.
Joseph called himself “Josie” and she called him “Daddy Long Legs”. It was not long before he began asking her for favors and she was carrying out daily errands for him. First it was tobacco, which was not just for personal enjoyment; it was the currency of the prison. With it you could bribe an officer, procure liquor, food or drugs or pay another convict for “services”. His requests moved on to candy, gum, newspapers and posting letters, their exchanges made using a secret hiding place in the quarry. The guards always searched the men when they returned from working outside and although security was tight, corruption was rampant; they would ignore the suspicious bulge in a prisoner’s clothing for a price. In return, Josie loaned Phyllis books from the prison library, although there was little choice of subject matter. Most were dated novels or old school textbooks with pages torn out and covered with prisoners’ comments in the margins.
There were several times when the two were almost caught and during those times Phyllis reconsidered her actions, her thoughts moving back and forth between thinking she was guilty of a sin and her belief she was carrying out an act of Christian charity.
Phyllis treasured every note Daddy Long Legs sent her, keeping them hidden in an Ovaltine tin under her bed. She quickly created a fantasy about their relationship, led on by his charming comments that he knew would secure her as his accomplice. The correspondence continued throughout his incarceration and when he was released, he disappeared.
The doomed affair was carried out against the backdrop of life at the Kinston Penitentiary in the early 1900s, a time when prisoners were treated cruelly and few supported prison reform. One of the major instigators for change was the Superintendent of Prisons, William St Pierre Hughes, who fought a long hard battle against the politicians and the Minister of Justice trying to change a system he believed was outdated, inhuman and doomed to failure. The rules and regulations had not been revised for over thirty years and Hughes had ambitious plans for his penitentiaries, but he was a man ahead of his time. He was mocked as a “convict lover” by those who felt that prisoners should be treated with strict discipline, beaten when they broke the rules and forced to do hard manual labour. They believed the only way convicts would turn away from bad behavior was if they were forced from it and cruelty was the mainstay of their approach. In the midst of this system were the officers and guards charged with keeping the prisoners in line, a relationship prone to corruption. Prisoners paid bribes so guards would look the other way when tobacco was passed, a deal was done and acts of sex or vengeance were carried out. Prisoners who thwarted the rules or upset the system were sent to the “The Hole”, an isolation unit where they were kept in a completely empty room with their hands shackled to the bars and left there for days on end, fed bread and a mug of water twice a day. There was also the room where they were stripped half naked and whipped or beaten, away from the eyes and ears of those who might see or hear what was going on.
Simonds creates rich portraits of the characters for her readers. Joseph Cleroux was a thief and a con artist, a handsome man who had manipulated people and his circumstances for years, supporting himself through crime. He was charming and smart, determined that his incarceration would not break him and he would survive to be free. He had already escaped the Great War and the Flu epidemic; he would find a way to endure. Unwilling to risk escape, he obeyed the rules when he had to and broke them when he could, insulating himself against prison life with bits of stolen clothing, pilfered food and smuggled tobacco.
One way he stepped away from the confines of his life was through his letters with Peggy, who smuggled him the goods he needed to be part of the prison’s underground economy and made life a little easier. He never criticized her, nurtured his connection with kind words and talked about his love of poetry. His letters were filled with spelling mistakes and he always signed them with these parting words: “trust me”. Yet he was far from truthful. He reinvented himself, lying about his family, his true identity and his criminal past, knowing she would never discover the truth. It was not so much Peggy that he wanted, it was the connection to the free world he needed. Peggy came to be his lifeline, a shelter from the silence imposed in the prison. He could talk to her about anything he wanted and with whatever words filled his head; it was a relief. He promised her many things but never delivered, even though she had risked so much to help him.
Phyllis was a plain and simple school girl in a large family. She had always been sickly and suffered from the cold with lung congestion and headaches. Never comfortable in social situations with her peers, Peggy quietly avoided them. Nor was she a good student. Her life, filled with the endless repetitive routines of home life, church and school did not point to any bright future and Portsmouth held little promise. She knew all the families, their siblings and their back stories and spent her days wishing for a different life. She easily fell under the spell of the convict, a man she never met or touched, her only connection their letters. As time passed, only his words mattered to her. His letters shaped her days as she waited for them, read them or stored up news to share with him. And there was that anticipation of opening the envelope and seeing what he had to say. When he said he enjoyed dancing, she practiced her steps in the kitchen with an imaginary partner. She wrote to him faithfully every day as her ruminations about what she constituted a sin and whether what she was doing was putting herself and her family at risk gradually faded. She convinced herself she was performing a Christian deed and earning a place for herself in heaven. Her naiveté deepened and led her to believe in a life that would come to be when Daddy Long Legs was released and they would share a life together. She imagined him striding up the path to her house with a ring in his pocket and a smile on his face.
Simonds’s created her narrative using seventy-nine letters from the Josie and four from Peggy, interspersing the letters with the story of how these two people, both hungry for a human connection, carried out their clandestine relationship. For both characters this communication with the other helped make life bearable.
This is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction, an important story because it provides an uncensored version of what life was like for prisoners in the Kingston Penitentiary during that time, a part of the narrative which at times is difficult to read. She also gives readers a sense of Portsmouth, the small town around the prison that housed the prison staff, their families and the services that supported them.
Simonds finishes the volume with an epilogue describing her unsuccessful attempts to find out more about the identity of Joseph Cleroux and what became of him. He used several pseudonyms, so she widened her search to a variety of names and places he was believed to have lived. She poured over census and property records, births deaths and marriages but came up empty, her only finding a mug shot of him in Ottawa’s National Archives. The addresses he had given Peggy led to run down rooming houses and one even led to a wooden shack.
Phyllis Halliday died a spinster in 1986 and lived in the house Simonds eventually came to own in Kingston. It was sold several times, each time that trove of documents was left in the attic, either no one had thought to go up there or saw what was there and chose to ignore it.
This proved to be a fascinating read. Kudos is deserved for the jacket cover which incorporates a postcard of Kingston Penitentiary and excerpts from Cleroux’s letters, a design which aptly reflects the contents of the book.
July 12, 2019
Very cool concept. I really enjoyed it.
October 11, 2015
I commend this author for putting in so much work and detail into the story. Obviously, she did a great deal of research, and I learned a lot through reading this.
The love story between Phyllis and Joe is compelling, sad, and completely held my interest. The fact that it's all built on letters that the author actually found makes it even more interesting. The information provided on the Canadian penal system, while interesting to a point, I felt was overdone. I truly could have dealt with about 100 pages less of the book, and by the end, was skimming these bits.
As, for me, this is a local story, I was glad to have the opportunity to read this, and think it's worthwhile particularly for those from the Kingston, Ontario region. The Pen has now closed, but for years was a massive structure in our community, and even empty, provides this ominous and curious building we all still drive by. In a way, this book was a scary and fascinating look inside.
The love story between Phyllis and Joe is compelling, sad, and completely held my interest. The fact that it's all built on letters that the author actually found makes it even more interesting. The information provided on the Canadian penal system, while interesting to a point, I felt was overdone. I truly could have dealt with about 100 pages less of the book, and by the end, was skimming these bits.
As, for me, this is a local story, I was glad to have the opportunity to read this, and think it's worthwhile particularly for those from the Kingston, Ontario region. The Pen has now closed, but for years was a massive structure in our community, and even empty, provides this ominous and curious building we all still drive by. In a way, this book was a scary and fascinating look inside.
August 19, 2011
Horribly written book - I'm sorry to report that despite all the awards it received, the majority of the book is dull and nothing but grocery lists between a convict and a girl lept off the page. The concept is great - An author buys an old house in Kingston, Ontario and finds a bunch of letters in the attic. Notes between a young woman in town who exchanges secret 'kites' or notes with a convict, all while we learn about the evolution of the penal system reform from a first person perspective. All the ingredients of a wonderful read on the jacket cover only to be disappointed by the contents.
Learning that the author herself is publishing the book out of lack of demand and matching it with her marketing prowes to promote the book the only thing I can say is she is great a the book business not at writing books herself.
Learning that the author herself is publishing the book out of lack of demand and matching it with her marketing prowes to promote the book the only thing I can say is she is great a the book business not at writing books herself.
February 17, 2008
Interesting....
Loved it until 3/4 of the way through, and then couldn't wait to finish.
Loved it until 3/4 of the way through, and then couldn't wait to finish.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 23, 2019
An intriguing work of fiction, that uses, in part, actual letters author Simonds found in the attic of a home near the real, crumbling and storied Kingston (Ontario) Penitentiary. These letters, smuggled out nearly every day by a convict, as he was marched to the adjacent limestone quarry for hard labour are addressed to local young lady. While "Peggy"'s replies are the product of the author's imagination and craft, the diligent research behind jail conditions and politics just after the "Great War" is evident : you can practically feel the quarry sweat and dust, the cold, unforgiving iron encasing each cell.
Interestingly, the novel is available for sale in the gift shop (!) of the now- decommissioned Kingston Pen -- which is how I discovered it. While my facility tour certainly helps, I don't think it is absolutely necessary to unpack the solid, interesting novel here : it was nominated for one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the Governor General's, in 1996.
Interestingly, the novel is available for sale in the gift shop (!) of the now- decommissioned Kingston Pen -- which is how I discovered it. While my facility tour certainly helps, I don't think it is absolutely necessary to unpack the solid, interesting novel here : it was nominated for one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards, the Governor General's, in 1996.
May 25, 2018
An odd book, neither 100% fiction nor 100% non-fiction. A bit of a "slow" read, but in the end absolutely fascinating. A real piece of Canadiana and, especially if you've ever visited the Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, it is most highly recommended.
August 5, 2018
Interesting enough, but only because I am from Kingston I think. An ok read only.
February 24, 2019
It’s a long, slow-moving read, but I enjoyed the story. Hughes was my favourite character!
Read
August 25, 2019TERRIBLE!!!!!! If I could give this book negative stars I would. Don't waste your time.
April 21, 2020
This book is a true story that happened in Kingston, ON, where I live. A convict drops letters when he is out for walks in hopes someone answers and sure enough they are.
July 27, 2020
Great book, mostly true abut a young woman who falls in love via letters with a convict.
March 21, 2022
I loved this book. I loved the connection to the history of this place in time and geography.
November 17, 2023
Excellent! I look forward to taking a tour of Kingston pen.
April 25, 2024
The ending had me gutted.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 25, 2025
Read for book club. Interesting concept but so much historical accuracy and research made for a dull read.
June 17, 2013
This is a complex blend of a documented correspondence between a young woman in Portsmouth, Ont. and a prisoner in what we now call Kingston Penitentiary and a history of the leadership of the penitentiary service of the period. The whole is held together with the fictional extrapolation of the letters and on the other side of the feelings and thoughts of the various officials. I found it absolutely fascinating and it brought back feelings I had in the early 1970's when I discovered what was meant by corporal punishment in the federal prison system. I don't think many today would be able to withstand a total breakdown under a regime that forbade talking, allowed one letter (to family only) a month, one approved library book at a time, no pictures, newspapers, magazines or gifts of any sort, and no tobacco in any form. Work consisted of the tailor's shop, carpentry, kitchen, or if you had no skill you worked in the stone quarry cutting limestone. If I didn't know how the correspondence was found I would never have believed it could have carried on under the noses of guards and fellow prisoners, but it must have made a tremendous difference to those few men who benefited from it, although I wonder what the actual effect was on Phyllis herself and her life. The project almost literally dropped MS Simonds' lap when she checked the attic of the house she'd just bought but the research work that followed filled seven years. I am so glad she spent that time on it.
September 9, 2021
"The Convict Lover" by Merilyn Simonds is part biography, part fiction, a wholly compelling story about a seventeen-year-old girl and the prisoner she befriends in post-World War I Ontario.
Full review: https://robyntocker.weebly.com/the-co...
Full review: https://robyntocker.weebly.com/the-co...
February 16, 2015
The author found a great number of old letters in her attic in Kingston. These proved to be correspondence between a teenage girl in 1919-20 and a convict labouring in the then-adjacent prison quarry. Simonds then wove together her research and a narrative non-fiction tale that imagines the lives of young Phyllis and the imprisoned object of her affection. It was interesting to learn about the history of the Canadian penal system, though the book was rather long - I had the feeling sometimes that the author was labouring to fill out what she could. Not sure about all of the conjecture about others' thoughts and feelings, but again it did fill in what might otherwise be a slight tale.
May 4, 2012
The story of this book takes place in Kingston ON.. during the building of the penitentiary. The stone blocks for the building were hacked out of a quarry directly across the road and on the brim of the quarry lives a young girl who is a maid for a wealthy family. One of the men prisoners notices her watching them and he leaves a note for her in a crevice.. the communication begins. He convinces her that when he gets out they will run away together. NOT! Merilyn Simonds discovered the letters and formed this story around them. Very believable.
October 11, 2012
The author found a stash of letters from a convict in Kingston to a local girl, dating1920-21. She has pieced together the story, as best as she can tell, of the relationship that developed between the two. It gives good insight into what life in prison was like during that time, but is also a rather sad love story as the girl falls in love with the convict and thinks he will come for her once he’s released.
December 6, 2016
While the premise is certainly an interesting one and the book is VERY well researched, it was also very dry and did nothing to make me engage with the characters. In fact, the characters really lacked more than cardboard personalities that one would expect from the time, without much to identify them as unique individuals. This is more a historical novel about the era and prison life / reform than about the actual relationship or individuals involved.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 5, 2016
Fantastic prose, so many sections that delighted me. The story bothered me and I was not surprised one bit by the actions of the convict upon his release. How sad that Phyllis lived alone all her life. I was fascinated by the politics of penitentiaries and the reforms attempted by various individuals.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 15, 2016
Really enjoyed this true story. You always wonder how this happens, and this story explains it and makes so easy to see how a convict in the Kingston Penitentary and a woman could fall in love and have an on-again / off-again relationship for so many years.
Read
January 30, 2011didn't finish although seemed an excellent book.
February 4, 2014
Held my interest.
February 13, 2016
Interesting book, very much enjoyed reading about Portsmouth Village as I lived very close for a number of years. Interesting to read the about the history of incarcerating people in Canada too.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews